For the third consecutive year, the Historical Society of the Lower Cape Fear will wrap up its annual candlelight home tour with a musical bow courtesy of Chamber Music Wilmington. The gift box, if you will, is St. Paul's Episcopal Church, resounding Sunday evening with music of one of the Baroque era's most influential composers, Antonio Vivaldi.

Cellist Stephanie Vial, co-director of The Vivaldi Project, spoke by phone from her home near Chapel Hill about Vivaldi and his influence on generations of composers extending well into the 19th century. Vial and the group's co-founder, violinist Elizabeth Field, have established the project as one of the finest early music groups in the country, playing music of Vivaldi and his contemporaries on instruments from the time the music was first played, and with careful attention to how the music is played.

"Vivaldi's music is the pinnacle of Italian string writing," Vial said. "It is the starting point for so much of the music that came after it."

That said, Vial also pointed out that Vivaldi was influenced as well, by his predecessors in Venice, composers such as Arcangelo Corelli, and Vivaldi's contemporary Antonio Caldara.

Corelli's reputation as a virtuoso violinist, as is evident in many of his idiomatic string concertos and sonatas, and Caldara's dramatic writing for voice each touched Vivaldi's own creative bent. Vivaldi in turn influenced his contemporaries, including Bach and his sons. Johann Sebastian even transcribed several of Vivaldi's string concertos for keyboards, including organ.

The program for The Vivaldi Project's Wilmington performance will consist solely of music by the group's namesake, a mix of solo concertos chosen to feature the singular interests and talents of Field, Vial and other members of the ensemble. Vial said that each solo concerto will be paired with an orchestral concerto, examples of the type of composition that would evolve into what is now known as a symphony.

Ultimately, Vial said, the group is dedicated to reviving and perpetuating the music of Vivaldi's time and beyond via live performance, combining emotion with rhetoric to appeal to the head and heart: "We like to think of music as a language with sentence structure and phrasing, vowels and punctuation, though communicating those thoughts and emotions with melody and harmony in a way that makes every performance unique."

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